Researchers with Intel Labs and Darmstadt University have found that self-driving cars learn better by playing in a fictional universe like Grand Theft Auto, reports the Daily Mail.
Alizera Shafaei, a UBC PhD student who wrote a paper showing how video games can be used to train a computer vision system, was quoted in the Mail article and in a similar story in Vice.
Synthetic data like that used in video games can be just as useful for training, if not more so, said Shafaei. “With artificial environments we can effortlessly gather precisely annotated data at a larger scale with a considerable amount of variation in lighting and climate settings.”
